The Medium
Psychological horror veteran Bloober Team indulges in some weird séance
PC, Xbox Series X
Amid the imposing Gothic churches and cold, Brutalist architecture of postcommunist Krakow, a woman is haunted by disturbing visions of a child’s death. This is the titular spiritualist, Marianne, whose psychic gifts are a bridge between the real and spirit worlds. As she seeks the truth behind a tragedy at a former vacation resort, Marianne navigates shifting realities and uncovers events that developer Bloober Team hopes will cause players to question their perceptions with every new discovery.
“Nothing is simple, nothing is black and white,” lead game designer Wojciech Piejko
tells us. “Playing as a medium gives you a unique vantage point beyond the reach of ordinary people. So the story is crafted in a way that you reveal more and more information, and hopefully it will change your point of view about the other characters and events.”
The Polish studio is known for its firstperson psychological horror – including two Layers Of Fear titles and cyberpunk drama Observer – which it has delivered to varying degrees of success. Its last game, Blair Witch,
was mired in gimmicks, compromising its horror with visual trickery that left us bemused but never truly put the wind up us. Convincing a player that they are lost and imperilled without frustrating them is a tricky thing to achieve; despite a handful of design flourishes and inventive mechanics (which never quite add up to the sum of their parts), Bloober Team has come close, but never nailed it.
Still, if at first you don’t succeed, try to ape something that did. The studio’s desire to create a more cinematic experience for a game about shifting perceptions has led Bloober to wear its influence on its sleeve, and openly pay homage to Silent Hill. Not only does The Medium riff on a central mechanic of two interchanging realities, its use of semi-fixed camera angles and thirdperson perspective (not to mention a distinctive soundtrack by Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka) ensures more than a passing resemblance. “We are die-hard Silent Hill fans,” admits producer Jacek Zieba, “and in everything we do, we are influenced by the series. Of course we don’t want to copy, we want to create a game that has a Silent Hill vibe, but on our terms. I’m curious how players will react to a different approach to a Silent Hill- type game. In the way that you have Souls games, we wanted to do ‘Hill games’.”
Bloober Team’s shift to thirdperson perspective for The Medium gives us the sense of walking behind our hero, almost insidiously suggesting that we should be afraid. More importantly, the closer angle enables us to see and feel Marianne’s reactions more explicitly. “It allows us to tell the story in a different way and pull different emotional strings,”
explains Piejko. “When you’re creating a scene in firstperson, you have completely different emotions connected to your character. There’s a scene in Observer where Dan finds the body of his son, and as a designer I imagine the scene will be super-powerful – he will find his son and start to yell and cry, and then you see his hands shaking. It’s a completely different experience showing your character’s eyes and face. I missed them in our previous games.”
Hearing the creeping strains of Yamaoka’s composition instantly transports us back to the late ’90s, the setting for The Medium itself. Bloober has recreated the stark, austere atmosphere of a post-Cold War Poland yet to fully embrace the consumerism of the west. “Everything has changed,” recounts Zieba. “Poland is open for the west, but it’s still an Eastern Bloc country that’s only been free for ten years in our timeline. Eastern Bloc countries looked really different then – a different colour palette, a different design. I think it can be really cool to be in that kind of environment in a videogame, and hopefully it will be something new for the player. In the story, Marianne goes to a communist resort that was a vacation resort in the ’80s. The resort is in the heart of Krakow, and we’ve copied it one-to-one, but placed it in a forest to allow players to feel more abandoned.”
Bloober Team has always tried to tread the thin line between giving us enough facility to navigate the game, and progress without too much hand-holding. In Blair Witch, this could lead to the player going in circles; Layers Of Fear employed similar environmental misdirection to better effect. With The Medium, however, the studio is taking a different approach to leading players a merry dance around its dual worlds. “The environment doesn’t change so dramatically,” says Piejko. “Of course, we’ve got the two worlds and sometimes you’re dragged into one or the other so then your perceptions change, but with semi-fixed cameras, I think navigation is easier. Whether you’re in one or other worlds, the camera angle is the same and it will help you orientate in the game world.”
Marianne will encounter fresh fears as she digs deeper into the tragedy at the heart of the story – fortunately, she can create a spiritual shield to defend herself against evil entities. She can also summon up a psychic energy blast to power something up in the spirit world that will then affect the normal world and vice versa, much like certain devices in Blair Witch, connecting mechanics and puzzles in both dimensions. She has no weapons as such; Zieba believes horror games are at their best when all you can do is run and hide. “It’s less about fighting – it’s more about discovering, exploring, defending, or even running. As a horror character you need to feel vulnerable, and of course most of the horror ends the moment you have a gun. Or many guns.”
The Medium was first announced for consoles in 2012, but the project remained sidelined, and Bloober Team cites its ambition for the game as the reason The Medium has only surfaced now, two console generations later. “The biggest issue was tech, how we can do the things we want to do, and [for the current gen] we started developing the game with some ideas as a base,” recalls Zieba. “But then we thought, ‘Okay, this generation is not going to handle it.’ Then Xbox Series X came in and it was like, ‘Maybe that will work.’ We don’t feel there are many boundaries now. With the SSD, when you transition between worlds there is no loading time – you are there, transitioned. No loading times means better immersion.”
Piejko confirms: “Series X has resolved many of the problems with the current generation that we had. We were able to deliver on the current gen, but it would not be the same game, the vision would not be fulfilled.” Zieba is emphatic that the team “don’t want to take any prisoners. We want to create the game as we see it, and we think the next generation will be the perfect place for it.” And then there’s that ‘secret feature’ Bloober Team has been teasing, which it claims will set the game apart from any other before it; they remain coy on the details. It’s a bold statement – then again, much like Marianne, perhaps Bloober’s seen things most of us haven’t.
“It’s less about fighting – it’s more about discovering, exploring, or even running”